Hitwise Intelligence - Sandra Hanchard - Asia Pacific

Beijing Olympics - Who's Capitalizing on the online Games?

2008-08-08T23:00:34Z

There is no doubt that the Olympics represents a major online media opportunity. As this article in ZDNet Asia points out, search engines have been geared up to distribute the heightened sports-related terms within their respective advertising networks. My colleague, Alan Long has written about the traction of consumer interest in the Olympics across global markets. I'll focus on paid search activity for the Games in Australia.

Our Hitwise Search data demonstrates that 'bejing olympics' sent the most clicks to the Sports – Olympics category, accounting for 6.32% volume, with a 'paid rate' of 1.24% for the 4 weeks ending 2 August, 2008*.

It's interesting to note that other leading terms to the Olympics category in the top 30, such as 'beijing olympics mascots' and 'australian olympians' attracted significantly higher paid rates of 8.59% and 10.12% respectively, indicating where advertisers are seeking out niche search opportunities.

Live and Yahoo! Search Australia - Strong Paid Rates

In a Hitwise Search Portfolio of 100 leading search variations on 'olympics', Google Australia was by far the dominant search engine distributing 75.67% of clicks, with a paid rate of 2.24% for the 4 weeks ending 2 August 2008. Live and Yahoo! Search Australia sent lower overall volumes of clicks, but sent higher rates of paid traffic; 10.3% and 8% respectively.

Yahoo!7 Sport, ninemsn, Telstra and SMH - Leveraging PPC

A Hitwise Search Intelligence report indicates that the official Beijing 2008 (English language) site was the main beneficiary of downstream traffic from Olympic searches, receiving more than 1 in 4 clicks, for the 4 weeks ending 2 August, 2008. Yahoo!7 Sport, ninemsn, Telstra and SMH all received paid traffic off Olympic search terms to their respective websites, with paid rates widely ranging between 3% and 66%. As the games progress, it'll be interesting to see if media players adapt their paid search campaigns to correspond with the success of Australian athletes or otherwise.

Korea Tourism Organization - Seeking to benefit from Olympic Travel

Sports and News and Media industries as you'd expect received significant volumes of clicks from Olympic searches. Interesting to note that Education – Reference was also up there, receiving 6.82% of clicks (driven primarily to Wikipedia). The Travel industry had high rates of paid search traffic off Olympics searches, with the Korea Tourism Organization website aggressively leveraging PPC for Australian interest in the Games.

*A "click" occurs when a user conducts a search, and then clicks on a search engine result to visit a website. "Paid rate" refers to the proportion of sent traffic that was from a sponsored link. Some of the metrics in this post will be available in our upcoming Search Intelligence release.

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Chris Anderson - End of Theory: Hitwise's measurement of the Petabyte Age

2008-07-30T22:45:40Z

It's always pretty cool when you read a piece of writing that recognises a paradigm shift - Chris Anderson's End of Theory piece in Wired starts out by saying that, "Our ability to capture, warehouse, and understand massive amounts of data is changing science, medicine, business, and technology."

Anderson's point that models have become obsolete in an era of 'data deluge' has annoyed more than a few scientists. Leaving models aside for the moment, I'll pick up on a couple of his arguments that are relevant to identifying trends in the marketing industry. Firstly that we're, "sifting through the most measured age in history" and secondly that we have our fingertips on, "dimensionally agnostic statistics".

As a researcher at Hitwise, I'll sometimes use a question or theory to guide me through our dataset (the online behaviour of 25 million users worldwide, on more than 1 million websites). Maybe I'll ask what's the consumer demand leading up to a product launch for retail, or how constituents are thinking about key environmental issues for government.

However, it's quite often the case that I'll let the data 'speak' first, then use context to form a theory and marketing application. Here's an example:

Our Hitwise Fast Moving Search Term report is purely based on terms that had the largest relative or volume increase in a given time period. Here's the top 10 search terms driving traffic to Education – Reference websites, week ending 19 July 2008:

There's a few interesting stories contained in those search terms that based on my contextual knowledge, I can pretty much 'get' immediately; such as 'radovan kardazic' and his recent capture, or 'china' and the impending Olympic games. Some of the terms make sense from a 'brand' point of view – 'bom' refers to the Bureau of Meteorology which is a popular online service for weather information. Other terms I'm not familiar with such as 'estelle getty' I can plug into a search engine to find out from news reports that the famous comedian recently died. I can then use our Hitwise Search Analysis report to find out the websites that actually received traffic on the term to confirm the reason behind the sudden increase in searches.

I would start to get the impression that many of the fast moving search terms sending traffic to Education – Reference websites are related to recent news items, and have therefore found an 'industry relationship'. For website owners in the Education – Reference space, I'd then recommend using SEO and PPC best practice on news items in their content strategies to boost traffic referrals.

"All models are wrong, but some are useful"

You could argue the fact that the data has been summarised into a programming format or that it's been put into an industry context, i.e. 'Education – Reference' that we've already created a model for our dataset. However, Anderson's made a valuable point that the availability of huge datasets to businesses and consumers is creating change in some important industries.

Online Video in OZ - YouTube dominates, MSN Video and CNET TV up

2008-07-23T06:26:29Z

Last week in our search press release we highlighted a 16% increase in traffic from search engines to video websites year-on-year in June 2008 by Australian Internet users. My colleague, Heather Dougherty recently noted in the U.S. that search engines had caught up to social networks in referrals to online video. Universal search and a shift to mainstream audiences are two key reasons for the rise in search referrals to online video.

YouTube.com is by far the dominant website in a Hitwise custom category of 80 video websites in Australia (including video search and channels hosting video content), accounting for 65.9% of visits for the week ending 19 July 2008. There have been some interesting movements by smaller players in the industry which the below chart illustrates:

Recent fast movers include MSN Video which increased by 63.8% during the week ending 19 July 2008, overtaking YouTube Australia. Hitwise clickstream data indicates that this was due to a jump in referrals from news.ninemsn.com.au. CNET TV attracted significant launch traffic after a re-design on the CNET website and increased by 61.9% in the past week. We're likely to see other niche online publishers offer video content to boost user traction.

Competing against YouTube

For video websites challenging the dominance of YouTube, there is an opportunity to build market share through diversified traffic sources. YouTube received more than 28% of its visits from Google search properties in June 2008 but the rest of its traffic included a mix of referrals from the leading social networks (MySpace, Facebook and Bebo), Portal Frontpages and Email Services. Video websites wanting to get off the ground should be using branded viral campaigns on leading and niche social networks to establish and build a fan base.

Snow Sports – Optimism and Opportunity

2008-07-16T08:14:33Z

I'm excited to welcome on board to the weblogs, Alan Long, Hitwise Research Director who will soon be joining me in covering online trends for the Asia Pacific region.

In the meantime, here's a guest post from Alan -

While it's been a few years since I have strapped on the planks for a slide (yep, I'm old skool) I still have a high level of interest in my once main sporting recreation.

After a slow start to the Australian snow season, the recent snow falls have generated a large increase in online interest. To highlight this I created a custom category containing resort and information sites for Australia, New Zealand and Japan that have been receiving traffic from Australian users over the past four weeks.

The chart below highlights the rapid growth in interest that was generated on the back of the first reasonable snowfall of the season in the context of other popular winter sports and the upcoming Olympics. The Australian snow season officially started on June 7.

While snow is hard to come by, garnering traffic against the generic terms seems to be as much of a challenge for our leading resorts.

The resorts are doing a great job of capturing traffic with their branded search terms which make up 15 of the top 20 search terms for the category, they makeup 58.6% of search traffic to the category with search engines delivering 31.86% of all traffic to the category.

Search Terms - Snow Resort / Site (Custom category)
Rolling 4 weeks to 12/07/2008

Search Term	Share
thredbo	6.09%
mt buller	5.98%
perisher blue	5.76%
falls creek	5.70%
mt hotham	3.35%
perisher	2.97%
snow report	2.34%
lake mountain	1.75%
hotham	1.50%
mount buller	1.10%
mount hotham	1.06%
buller	0.87%
snow cam	0.81%
snow cams	0.77%
perisherblue	0.58%
perisher snow report	0.54%
thredbo snow report	0.53%
ski.com.au	0.52%
coronet peak	0.51%
ski	0.47%
Source: Hitwise Australia, 14/07/2008

The generic terms are more challenging with the majority of the traffic going to independent sites, such as the category leader ski.com.au.

An analysis of the search portfolio highlights the two key content features searched for (outside of the resort searches) are Ski / Snow Reports and Snow Cameras, responsible for 16.6% of all traffic generated to the category.

The resorts do capture a percentage of this traffic, but the independents dominate non branded searches and infiltrate the outcomes of branded snow cams and report searches.

Weekly Ranking - Custom Category Snow Resorts & Sites
week ending 12/07/2008
Rank	Website	Domain	Market Share
1	ski.com.au	www.ski.com.au	20.99%
2	Perisher Blue	www.perisherblue.com.au	15.92%
3	Mt Buller	www.mtbuller.com.au	14.60%
4	Mt Hotham Alpine Resort - Victoria	www.mthotham.com.au	10.41%
5	Falls Creek	www.fallscreek.com.au	10.23%
6	Thredbo	www.thredbo.com.au	10.06%
7	Official Victorian Snow Report	www.vicsnowreport.com.au	3.04%
8	Mount Hotham	www.hotham.com.au	3.03%
9	NZSki.com	www.nzski.com	2.87%
10	Lake Mountain Resort	www.lakemountainresort.com.au	2.69%
11	Selwyn Snowfields	www.selwynsnow.com.au	2.16%
12	Snow.co.nz	www.snow.co.nz	1.25%
13	Cardrona Alpine Resort	www.cardrona.co.nz	0.73%
14	Treble Cone Ski Area	www.treblecone.co.nz	0.53%
15	Whistler Blackcomb	www.whistler-blackcomb.com	0.34%
16	Snow Japan	www.snowjapan.com	0.32%
17	Mt Ruapehu	www.mtruapehu.com	0.29%
18	Big White Ski Report	www.bigwhite.com	0.22%
19	Snow Japan	www.skijapanguide.com	0.09%
20	Chill Factor	www.chillfactor.com.au	0.07%

Source: Hitwise Australia, 14/07/2008

So what does this all mean?

Well, there are opportunities for resorts and independents alike to maximize traffic through search strategies, align website content and its delivery to reader interest and investigate affiliate and content share arrangements.

You need to be an optimist to be a snow sports addict and an opportunist to compete in a limited market, but there are gaps for the resorts and the independent sites alike to increase their share.

Demand for personalized health services online

2008-07-15T23:44:29Z

While the launch of the 3G iPhone has our attention on the uptake of mobile apps and services, I believe this points to a greater trend of the adoption of personalised web services. The health care industry is one leading example - two websites that have caught my interest recently are the genetic web-based service, 23andMe and Google Health, which allows users to organise their own health information.

There are many trust, privacy and regulatory issues that need to be nutted out before these types of websites will flourish. Similarly to the banking industry where online services have been widely adopted by users to gain greater control over their finances, web-based personalised health services have the potential to help consumers manage their own health care.

Hitwise data indicates that the climate for these kind of services in Australia could be ripe. Visits to our Health & Medical – Information category was at the highest point ever over a 3-year time period in June 2008. There was a 27.4% increase in visits to Health & Medical – Information websites year-on-year comparing June 07 and June 08.

Australian Visits to Health and Medical - Information Industry

Virtual Medical Centre, an Australian website that provides health information written by medical professionals, was one of the fastest growing websites contributing to the growth in this category. Traffic to Virtual Medical Centre gathered momentum in August last year, and since then has increased by 322.7% amongst all websites.

While it appears that health information websites are burgeoning in Australia – are consumers willing to yield their health details online yet? Your thoughts?

Garnaut report - taking the public pulse on climate change

2008-07-10T23:22:55Z

I was watching an episode of Boston Legal earlier this week - while the show's antihero, Denny Crane never fails to surprise me with his antics, watching him use a toy-gun to paint-ball an environmentalist took the cake. But it was the slippery arguments on green politics by one of his side-kick attorneys in court that got me thinking about topics closer to home.

Last week a draft of the Garnaut report was released in Australia. Based on an independent study by Professor Ross Garnaut, the review examines the impact of climate change on the Australian economy and provides a forum for public debate. Here's a view of how Australian Internet users are thinking about climate change, with a Hitwise report of the top 20 search variations on 'climate change':

Australian Search Variations on 'Climate Change'

Criticism that the Garnaut report needs to be simplified for public consumption could be justified with some of the queries asking for a basic definition of climate change ('what is climate change', 'define: climate change'). There is an interest in the science and validity of climate change ('climate change proof', 'climate change science' and 'climate change skeptics') as well as concern for the impact of climate change ('effects of climate change', 'climate change vulnerability').

What struck me as missing are questions on practical steps that individuals and organisations can take to limit their impact on the environment. Perhaps this is indicative of the confusion around what contributes the most to climate change. If you believe the lawyers on Boston Legal, taking a walk to the shops could be worse for the environment than driving a car.

For the scientists, economists and policy makers involved in the climate change debate, monitoring how Internet users search on 'climate change' can provide a measure of how well knowledge is being disseminated to the general public.

iPhone plans and prices top of mind

2008-07-08T23:02:08Z

Previously I wrote about how iPhone features and apps were driving consumer searches during rumours of a launch date in Australia. As we get closer to July 11, it's clear that Australian consumers are now focused on the pricing and carriers for the iPhone as indicated by their search behaviour.

Here's an updated view of my chart where iPhone plans and price specific queries were nearly 5x greater than searches related to iPhone features and apps (week ending 5 July 2008). It'll be interesting to see if consumers remain highly price-conscious about the iPhone right up until the Christmas retail period, or if searches for iPhone applications will become more prominent again.

Australian iPhone carriers

As many of the search queries for iPhone plans and prices included the names of carriers, here’s a more detailed analysis of their respective brands. The below chart compares search queries on the iPhone that either included the term, 'Optus', 'Telstra' or 'Vodafone' - providing a measure of consumer awareness of each carrier.

iPhone-related search queries for Optus, Telstra and Vodafone spiked week ending 14 June 2008 immediately after the announcement, with Optus and Vodafone brands leading neck-in-neck. Telstra’s later announcement that it would also enter the market to sell the iPhone attracted significant media coverage, with search volumes for Telstra iPhone-related queries higher than Optus and Vodafone, week ending 5 July 2008.

Putting the dominance of eBay and PayPal into context

2008-07-04T01:09:24Z

During the Christmas shopping period last year I wrote a piece for Inside Retailing about the challenges and missed online opportunities for retailers in the Australian market. It's a good time to revisit this topic in light of the proposal made by ACCC to revoke eBay's PayPal only policy. While eBay's bid has been dropped, it's worth bringing the spotlight on Internet retail activity in Australia.

ACCC chairman, Graeme Samuel made a fair observation about "eBay's position as Australia's leading online marketplace." eBay Australia was the leading website in the Hitwise online Shopping & Classifieds industry in May 2008, accounting for 29.07% market share of visits. The next website to follow was eBay with 4.09% share of visits. During this period, Hitwise tracked over 31,500 websites in the Shopping & Classifieds industry, ranging from comparison shopping websites to the online properties of major retail brands.

Visits to the online Auctions industry are in fact particularly high in Australia. Auctions websites accounted for 38.11% of visits to all Shopping & Classifieds websites in May 2008 in Australia, compared to 21.35% by U.S. Internet users.

This article from the WSJ surmises that "consumers Down Under have plenty of choices of where to trade their goods online." Within the Auctions space, the combined properties of ebay.com and ebay.com.au accounted for 83.3% market share of visits by Australian Internet users during the week ending 28 June 2008.

eBay's nearest competitor, Trading Post Online debuted at 3rd position (week ending 14/06/08) when it launched its auctions service and accounted for 3.78% share of visits during the week ending 28 June 2008. Oztion Auctions followed with 2.53% market share, reaching its highest point ever during the week ending 28 June 2008.

Online Payments

The crunch of the ACCC's proposal however was not about the dominance of eBay; it was about the competitiveness of online payment systems in Australia. In a Hitwise custom category of 20 alternative payment services, that excludes major financial institutions, PayPal is by far the dominant player accounting for 82.24% share of visits week ending 28 June 2008. Google Checkout and Paymate Australia accounted for 1.85% and 0.88% share of visits respectively.

When we compare PayPal against all Business & Finance websites, that includes major financial institutions, it ranked 22nd during the week ending 28 June 2008. In comparison, PayPal ranked at 4th position in the Business & Finance industry in the U.S. market.

Window of Opportunity for Major Retail Brands

With the spotlight on eBay, PayPal and the local sellers who operate on eBay, competing retail brands should be considering the online retail experience they offer. Can they provide a seamless and secure online shopping experience that provides more choice for Australian consumers?

Employment markets and predictability - Hong Kong visits a sure thing

2008-06-18T23:16:05Z

One of our favourite topics on the blog is predictability – indeed I'm working my way through an essay Bill mentioned on this topic, The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb. While Black Swan covers themes such as outlier events and uncertainty, it's been interesting to contrast those ideas with seasonal patterns we observe online at Hitwise that make the art of prediction sometimes possible.

So it was good timing when my colleague, Rebecca Hannon passed this chart on to me showcasing the regularity in visits to Employment websites by Hong Kong Internet users. While many of the markets we track at Hitwise also indicate seasonal trends in the Employment industry, Hong Kong is noteworthy because the variance in market share between peak months each year is particularly small (0.07% difference between June 05 and May 07).

The regularity of this chart is in fact quite remarkable. I double-checked against other industries that we know to be seasonal in nature, such as Education – Institutions, Shopping & Classifieds and Travel, to see if there were similar effects. While seasonal peaks and troughs in other industries were visible, the Employment category in Hong Kong stood out for its stability of market share of visits over time.

Assuming that the seasonality of Employment visits was probably linked to school holidays, I delved into our Clickstream data to look to see if traffic drivers to the Employment category could provide more context on this trend:

You'll see that there's now more complexity evident in our clickstream data than the original chart. While there's been an overall decline in referrals from industries such as Government and Education, it appears to have been offset by increased comparison research between Employment websites. But this still doesn't really say why the Employment category is so stable.

I'm afraid I don't know enough about the Hong Kong labour market to make strong inferences with our data. The regularity of visits to Employment websites could indicate a stable labour economy; in contrast the increase in Employment comparison traffic suggests greater competition in placing job hunters. But those are just guesses. What's your opinion?

Gen Ys - Online Habits and Who's Influencing Them

2008-06-18T03:30:37Z

Recently I spoke on a panel at FST Media's Technology & Innovation conference, where there was a focus on disruptive technologies in the banking and financial services sector. One of the questions I found intriguing was, "What would a Gen Y CIO look like in 2020?"

Let's have a look at what Gen Ys are doing online now to give us clues as to what they'll be doing in the next decade, if it's indeed possible to speculate that far ahead. Using Hitwise Demographics data, the below table highlights industries that are attracting a high percentage of their traffic from 18-24 year olds. (Note that a demographic search by traffic percentage reveals niche advertising opportunities).

My immediate impression is that we have Gen Ys engaged with online industries that affect diverse areas of their lives. This ranges from the social (close to 1 in 4 visits to Weddings online are from Gen Ys), to Education (23.9%) and Employment (19.5%). They're highly engaged with the Internet as a communication and networking channel, demonstrated by their usage of web-based Email (18.9%) and Social Networking (17.8%). Mobile Phones and Telecommunications feature amongst the top 20 industries, signifying that 24/7 connectivity is a natural part of their lifestyle. They're also big consumers of online entertainment, accounting for 17.6% of visits to the Multimedia industry.

This overview doesn't necessarily answer the question of what a Gen Y CIO would look like however. During the panel I speculated that a Gen Y would be leveraging social technologies for product development. Difficult to prove, so I thought I'd at least have a look at what Gen Ys are reading, in particular the tech publications that are influencing them.

Here's the top 20 News & Media – IT Media websites attracting the highest volume of visits by 18-24 year olds in Australia. The below table ranks websites by volume to help find maximum traffic opportunities for engaging with Gen Ys. Percentage of traffic for each site is listed next to it to indicate the best opportunities for niche traffic. For example, Digg is attracting the highest volume of traffic from Gen Ys, while sites such as Ars Technica, Overclockers Australia, Wired News, Mac Rumors and PC Magazine have a high percentage of their traffic from 18-24 year olds.

IPhone Australian Launch - Features & Apps driving Consumer Interest

2008-06-12T00:49:40Z

When it comes to mobile phones I am a luddite - being the recipient of hand-me-downs for the past few years. But with the announcement of a launch date for the iPhone in Australia, I'm tempted to acquire one for myself.

Robin writes about the iPhone hype in the UK market, and consumer interest in Australia is no different. Hitwise measured over 5,000 search variations on 'iphone' by Australian Internet users prior to the official announcement including, 'iphone australia', '3g iphone', and 'iphone review' (4 weeks ending 7/6/08). Searches for '3g iphone' ramped up mid-April this year, and increased by 67% comparing weeks ending 31/5/08 and 7/6/08.

Given that much of the news related to the iPhone has been based on a rumoured launch date, I thought it would be interesting to do a break-down of the search queries to see what has been driving consumer interest. I created some search term portfolios and compared search volume for queries related to the release date, reviews and news, carriers and features and apps.

This chart highlights that it's really the features and third-party applications of the iPhone that have been a large component of consumer search; examples of terms include, 'iphone applications', 'iphone games' and 'iphone specs'. While the term, 'iphone price' ranked at #20 amongst search variations, I expect these types of queries will increase now that we have an official launch date.

For marketers, this type of analysis can be used in a product launch strategy to help quantify what consumers are likely to research. In the electronics space, communications and messaging around product specs is crucial in meeting consumer interest.

Now that Vodafone and Optus have been named as official distributors, it'll be interesting to see in the coming weeks if and how website traffic is re-distributed from News & Media websites (which attracted 11.49% of search traffic from 'iphone') to Telecommunications and Retail websites.

Fuel Watch - Profiling Bargain Hunters Online

2008-04-22T00:01:44Z

The announcement last week of an Australian national scheme that will publish fuel prices online for the next day has highlighted the impact of empowering consumers with time-sensitive information. Quite some time ago I wrote about financial services and information asymmetry, specifically the power of the Internet to shift information from the hands of those who have it into the hands of those who do not, and believe that a similar principle applies here.

On the fuel watch debate, Melbourne Business School Professor of Management, Joshua Gans writes in this post, Is Ignorance Good? that there are two kinds of consumers when it comes to purchasing fuel, namely 'fillers' and 'hunters':

"Fillers don't know or have the time to search for the best petrol deals. They fill up when they need to. On the other hand, hunters are shrewd individuals who what to pay less for petrol."

The FuelWatch WA website has been cited as a successful precedent to the nation-wide scheme, so I decided to use our Lifestyle Demographics tool to profile who these 'hunters' might be.

There are two predominant household groups likely to visit FuelWatch WA - Hitwise Lifestyle Mosaic Groups, 'Privileged Prosperity', the most affluent families in the most desirable locations; and 'Family Challenge', mixed families with stretched budgets in outer suburbs. Both 'Privileged Prosperity' and 'Family Challenge' households indexed above 190 in visits to Fuel Watch WA for the 12 weeks ending 12 April 2008.

It's interesting that the households that spend time researching the best petrol deals are from such contrasting socio-economic backgrounds - financial 'smarts' and necessity appears to motivate the bargain hunter. When the national website is launched later this year, we'll see if the audience profile evens out to represent more consumers as some predict, or whether we'll see the same types of households scouting fuel prices online.

What are Kiwis Doing Online? Global Benchmarks

2008-03-20T03:13:23Z

I wrote a month ago about the leading industries that Australians were visiting online. Taking another online snapshot, this time of the New Zealand market, we've determined that Kiwis are more likely to visit News & Media, Portal (Frontpages) and Travel than their counterparts in Australia and the US (week ending 15 March 2008). Also interesting to note that New Zealand visits to online shopping has surpassed the Australian market. Here's a top-line summary:

* News & Media - accounted for 6.7% share of visits the week ending 15 March 2008. Online News & Media consumption was high compared to the Australian and US markets, which accounted for 6.12% and 3.9% market share respectively. The New Zealand Herald was the top news player with 12.4% share of visits, followed by Fairfax's Stuff, with 10.06% share of visits for the week ending 15 March 2008.

* Portal Frontpages – attracted more visits in the New Zealand market with 5.78% share of Internet visits, than in Australia and US, with market shares of 4.43% and 5.55% respectively. The leading Portal Frontpage was MSN New Zealand accounting for 38.31% share of visits, followed by Yahoo!xtra with 15.98% for the week ending 15 March 2008.

* Travel – was a leading industry in the New Zealand market, accounting for 2.67% share of visits, compared to 2.5% in Australia and 2.19% in the US. New Zealand Travel visits for the week ending 15 March 2008 were also higher than the peak online travel season in the US market in 2007, which recorded 2.2% share, week ending 14 July 2007. Leading travel players were Air New Zealand (17.65% share), Wises Maps (3.83%) and Google Maps New Zealand (2.59%) for the week ending 15 March 2008.

* Shopping & Classifieds – accounted for 7.18% market share of visits the week ending 15 March 2008, significantly less than the US market with 9.7%, but ahead of the Australian market with 5.73%. US benchmarks indicate that there is potential for improved performance by vendors in the retail sector to increase online engagement. This is further highlighted by the fact that 28.3% of New Zealand visits to Shopping & Classifieds websites were directed to overseas websites suggesting local inventory opportunities. TradeMe was the leading website in the Shopping & Classifieds industry with a massive 48.4% share for the week ending 15 March 2008.

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Underbelly vs. So You Think You Can Dance

2008-03-05T04:25:33Z

With the 2008 TV ratings season well and truly started, Australian online searches for viewers' favourite shows have surged. While the new season officially kicked off on February 10, there were increased searches for 'So You Think You Can Dance', the Network Ten talent contest, week ending 9 February 2008, indicating successful marketing leading up to the program.

Nine Network's Melbourne crime drama, 'Underbelly' received a huge spike in searches week ending 16 February 2008, partly related to the court order that banned its screening in Victoria. Underbelly has since received higher volume of search variations than So You Think You Can Dance. The below figure charts search variations for TV programs on Channel 7, Nine Network and Network Ten.

A quick look at the TV ratings over at OzTAM indicates that So You Think You Can Dance attracted more viewers than Underbelly between 17 February and 23 February 2008, contrary to our search data. There is a fairly simple explanation however, with the broadcast ban on Underbelly prompting viewers to search for episodes online instead. A Hitwise Search Term Report on the term 'underbelly' indicates a substantial volume of searches for torrents and downloads.

The likelihood that it was Victorian users seeking to download episodes of Underbelly is reflected by our Demographics data. The Traffic Breakdown chart shows that 39.53% of traffic to Underbelly came from Victoria. As Victoria represents 23.91% of the online population, the index of Underbelly's representation in this State is 165.36.

Social Graph – Implications for Marketers

2008-03-04T01:22:26Z

Last week we released our Asia Pacific Social Networking Report – I thought I would share an excerpt that discusses the importance of the social graph for marketers in 2008.

The social graph is a notion that refers to the data that expresses an individual: their consumer preferences and behaviours; and their various social networks, including friends, family, professional associates and online contacts. The social graph will be an important point of debate in 2008 as it poses two key problems: for users there is the challenge of managing multiple networks – including logins and importing/exporting personal data. For social network owners, there is the commercial decision of how they should participate in an 'open Internet', defined by platforms that permit data sharing between networks.

While these may be technology or end-user considerations, marketers will need to watch this issue closely as it could impact how they choose to work with social networks. This could involve developing widgets that are compatible for multiple social networks, or applications that draw in data from the full spectrum of a user's social graph. Other potential avenues for marketers include targeting websites that facilitate management of user data sources, such as Plaxo.

The movement of Australian Internet users across multiple social networks is highlighted by the figure below. The downstream traffic from each of the major social networks to other industry players demonstrates a wide dispersal of traffic.

* Of the traffic that MySpace, Facebook and Bebo send to other Social Networks, more than 89% of their downstream traffic is sent to second-tier players. While the major players hold concentrated market share of visits to the Social Networks custom category, there is significant referral traffic to minor networks. This underpins the importance of understanding multiple network loyalties.

* After visiting Facebook or Bebo, most users are likely to visit MySpace. While this is a reflection of the dominance of MySpace in market share of visits, it could also be because MySpace offers additional features to the other networks, such as bands and artists content. Network differentiation is likely to be an important factor in how Social Networks will compete for users.

* Bebo received 2% of downstream traffic from MySpace, compared to 1% from Facebook. This indicates that MySpace and Bebo users could have stronger network 'affinities', with users influencing migratory behaviour across both networks.